U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announces the Justice Department's new plans regarding voting rights during a speech Thursday at the National Urban League conference in Philadelphia.
(Matt Rourke | The Associated Press )

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder said Thursday he will use surviving sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to make certain states go through federal clearance before they change their election laws.

"Even as Congress considers updates to the Voting Rights Act in light of the Court's ruling, we plan, in the meantime, to fully utilize the law's remaining sections to subject states to pre-clearance as necessary," Holder said Thursday during a speech in Philadelphia covered by the Washington Post.

Holder continued:

"My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal to stand against such discrimination wherever it is found."

The ruling Holder referred to was the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last month that makes Congress re-examine the provision in the act that determined which states with a history of discrimination had to seek Justice Department "pre-clearance" before they could change voting laws. Congress must come up with a new formula, based on current information, to determine which state must get pre-clearance.

The targeted piece of the law, Section 5, affected Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, Alaska, Arizona and parts of seven other states, including North Carolina

According to The Wall Street Journal, Holder said his department will try to use a different section of the voting rights law to keep Texas subject to pre-clearance, basing the attempt in part on a 2012 federal court ruling that congressional districts drawn by the Texas Legislature were discriminatory to Hispanics. Government lawyers would ask a judge to make Texas get prior approval from either Justice or a federal court before implementing voting-rule changes.

Holder's announcement is likely to rile conservatives who have argued that the law has outlived its usefulness, the Journal predicted.

It riled Texas Republicans, the Post reported.

In a prepared statement, Sen. John Cornyn said Texans "should not - and will not - stand for the continued bullying of our state by the Obama administration."

Gov. Rick Perry said the Obama administration was trying an end-run around the Supreme Court that "undermines the will of the people of Texas, and casts unfair aspersions on our state's commonsense efforts to preserve the integrity of our elections process."

Texas also is among eight states that have passed laws that require voters to show photo identification -- a procedure critics say court hurt turnout among minority voters.

Under the federal voting act, Texas has to get pre-clearance from Justice before the law could go through. The department turned down the change and federal courts upheld the decision. After the Supreme Court's Voting Rights Act ruling, Texas officials announced they would go forward with the state's voter-ID law.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, the state Senate is expected to vote on a bill Thursday that would establish a list of valid government-issued photo IDs required to vote, eliminate same-day voter registration and straight ticket party voting, and cuts a week from early voting. The bill also would move North Carolina's presidential primary earlier to follow South Carolina's vote more closely, weaken disclosure requirements for those paying for campaign ads, and boost the ability of political parties to get corporate donations.

A handful of protesters staged a sit-in at the state House speaker's office Wednesday following a tentative Senate vote on the bill, WTVD-TV in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., reported.

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